Mark Edwards Reviews

Session Reports: Game Plays, Mini Reviews, & Comments

–by Mark Edwards (edited and severely condensed)
2002-2004

Mark Edwards makes a move in Marco Polo

Fish Eat Fish

The game wasn’t all that exciting. There’s obviously a large bluffing
element, and plenty of info for the card counters out there to keep track
of, but the board play was blah. None of us were very impressed. ( Note: This is a Reiner Knizia game. –ed )

King Me!

“Kremlin-lite”. Another game of bluff, but this time it worked better. Not great, but it could be a decent filler as it moved very quickly.

Warcraft — The Boardgame

The whine level got pretty high. The human player’s special abilities were just too powerful. Basically the human player can nix casualties caused to him, either by card play or by the special ability of one of his units (once its fully upgraded). The net result is that the human armies are very difficult to fight against even with overwhelming odds, at least on the scale of battles we were involved in (a handful of units on each side).

Other than that obvious play balance issue, there’s some things to like about this game. The design is very simple and yet conveys a good feel of its namesake PC game. I especially liked the resource gathering. Peons located on gold mines or forests can gather resources by rolling a special die. The die has three ’1′ faces, two ’2′s and a single ’3′ face. If you roll the ’3′ you put a depletion counter on the mine or forest. Two depletion counters and you can no longer gather on that space. This exhaustion of resources pulls the game along as centrally located mines/forests quickly become focal points of conflict.

The board is hex based but is made up of various puzzle pieces that are printed on both sides. Thus the variety of maps can be large. The game is built around gaining VP (Victory Point) locations (marked on the boards in various values) and this also can lead to some interesting choices in scenario building. We played a team scenario where the first team to hit 30 VPs won. That number of VPs pretty much dictated that at least one opposing player be knocked out, but you can easily create a scenario where that isn’t necessary and the end result could hinge on some raiding tactics (say play to 20 VPs instead).

The bits for units were wooden (cardboard counters for the peons). A surprising choice given the audience I think they’re going for with this game. I’d have thought they’d take the Age of Mythology path and gotten some detailed minis. The result is fairly bland, but it works even if the dragons look like squirrels. They also should’ve supplied meeples for the peons. The town building/upgrade unit paths is/are also handled easily and cleanly. Each race has its own set of units with some variety in their strength and a few having special powers. Each race also has its own deck of cards, which are used during game play. In another odd design choice they chose not to put the text describing the card’s abilities on the cards themselves. Instead you’ve got to refer to the back of the rules. I guess they were going for the clean uncluttered look for the cards. I dunno.

Board play is simple and although your combat units move very slowly there’s plenty of room for sudden thrust and parry maneuvers due to card play and the way combat is handled. When combat is triggered in a hex (by an enemy unit moving into the hex) all the surrounding hexes are also involved in that battle. Combat is resolved by simple 1d6 rolls with
to-hit numbers based on the strength of the units involved. There’s some
simple interplay between ranged, winged and ground units; nothing we
haven’t seen before.

The net result of all this is a very nifty and straightforward war
game. They provide you with various scenarios to play and the mix of map pieces included obviously begs for user designed scenarios. So you can go for the epic night-long slugfest or for something a little more along the slashing maneuver line with your scenario choice. The special abilities seemed a bit unbalanced to us, in particular the humans were too hard to kill and the undead’s powers too wimpy, but I’m sure we’ll see lots of fixes for that.

I’m giving it a tentative thumbs up as I think it’s got good
potential. They just need to iron out the play balance of the special
powers a bit. I also think it’s a good candidate to bring out with
younguns, given the theme and simple game play.

ROADS & BOATS

R&B was good, but not great. Another logistics puzzle kinda game with plenty of interplay with other players due to space constraints on the board. The screwage possibilities seemed enormous, especially down the stretch, but the price to be paid for such screwage looked to be prohibitive. Indeed given the nature of our setup, any attempt at screwing your neighbors would only give the game to the folks on the other side of the river.

DIE FUGGER

This is a neat little game, which reminds me strongly of Quandary with a dash of Modern Art thrown in.

FOPPEN

Funky little trick taking game where you’re trying to get rid of your hand. Problem is that if you play the low card on a trick, you sit out the next trick. At the end of a hand you score 10 points if you have no cards, otherwise you lose points equal to the face value of the cards you have left. I never quite got my head wrapped around the point where I should keep my higher cards in hopes of getting the lead and burning them, as opposed to dumping the high cards cuz they count badly against you at the end of the hand.
GET THE GOODS I rather like this UP-lite game.

TICKET TO RIDE

Went over well. (One of the players) liked it so much he went out and bought the last copy at the Game Keeper. For some reason this game just doesn’t do much for me.

COSA NOSTRA

A silly little backgammon variant with a neat gangster car spinner! Gotta love going for the hit.

SAN MARCO

I was bemoaning my lack of Doge cards (I got one the entire game) and spent most of the game in the S.H.T. position. My standard El Grande strategy (put lots of pieces on the board) seemed to be failing miserably. Yet as the end neared the other three players started hitting on each other and thus it came to pass that all my little 2nd place finishes added up in the final scoring. I won despite being so losing the entire game. I was as shocked and appalled as my opponents. I enjoy the pie-splitting mechanism but the board play just seems too chaotic.

VOLLDAMPF

My new favorite game of late (it’s no Ra, mind you). With fewer
than 5 players, it played a little differently (because) you needed to issue
more bonds (shares?) since you built 3 tracks a turn instead of 2. Unless I know there’s going to be a big payoff, I tend to duck out of the bidding for tile choice/turn order pretty early. I also like to build as much
track as I can. It just seems like you never quite know when it’ll come in
handy down the road. This “get a piece of the action” strategy seemed to work fairly well. It almost feels like you should skip those piddly 1 shipments early on just to get an action card or two. They can be very powerful.

DAYTONA 500

Once we got into the game things became a bit more
interesting, especially as folks figured out the screwage involved. We figured that a bit of Royal Turf style betting, or even blind betting
(ala Top Race) could add a bit more to the fun factor.

What’s Playing Too Two

–by Mark Edwards

SAVE THE PRESIDENT

References to the “Soviets” as the enemy dated this game (1984). The board is truly hideous to look at and there’s simply too much information crammed on there. There’s even stuff on there for yet to be released expansions! Check out the pics on BGG: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/viewitem.php3?gameid=6486
Once you get by the board and some confusing rules there’s actually a game
there. It’s sort of like Bang! in the sense that some folks are good guys,
some are bad, but no one knows which. The Soviet players are out to
assassinate the president during his journey from the White House to the
Capitol. The US players are obviously there to save him. Each player has
6 agents which they send scurrying around the board. The agents can
capture other player’s agents and/or take shots at the prez.
The president ambles along in his car in a semi-random trip across the
board. The bad guys try to “triangulate” (see the board) on the president
by occupying vertices of various triangles in which he resides. The
smaller the triangle and the fewer opposing agents occupying the triangle’s
vertices, the better the odds of a successful shot.
The game enters a new phase once the president has reached the Capitol
safely or has been killed. At this point the Soviet agents attempt to
escape the scene.
The Soviet player gets points for successfully wounding/killing the prez,
capturing US agents, and successfully exiting agents at game’s end. All
the US players get points if the prez survives and points for each Soviet
agent they capture. There’s also a way for a US player to turn traitor and
help the Soviet player off the president in order to get some points.
The game didn’t work too well for us with 3 players; somewhat because one player tipped his hand a bit early and so we effectively cordoned him off from
the president and captured his agents whenever we could. He actually had a
slight chance at getting a good shot off at the president as the prez
approached his destination and we had let our guard down to run
around and capture agents. Alas it wasn’t in the cards. Oh yeah, there
are cards which allow you to do special stuff, beam across the board, lay
traps, take control of routes, etc.

PROCLAIM!

This one is sort of a multiplayer, every man for himself, version
of PASSWORD. On your turn you look at a word on a card and try to give one
word clues so that other player(s) will guess it. If they do you and they
get points, the more players that guess correctly (everyone secretly writes
their answers) the fewer the points, and the more clues it takes the fewer
points. So what you want is to give an obscure clue so that only one
person will get the correct answer as soon as possible. Oh you also get
points as the clue giver if everyone guessed wrong and all their answers
are unique. There are also some funky “PROCLAIM!” spaces on the board. Fans of PASSWORD might enjoy it.

THE REALLY NASTY HORSE RACE GAME

This is a new angle on a racing game. There are 6 races to be raced, each awards a different amount to the winner (and 2nd and 3rd). The values have quite a range so some races are more important than others. Each player has six horses, valued 1-6. The 1 horse is the best, the 6 the worst. He assigns each horse to one of the races.
At the start of each race pole positions are randomly determined and then
odds are calculated. Basically you multiple the horses value times its
pole position in order to get its odds of winning. The odds here aren’t
particularly scientific, but who ever said handicapping is a science? The
odds are written up (using dry erase markers) on this neat stand up cardboard chart for all to see. A nice twist here is that then you get to bet on one of the horses, not necessarily your own. So those long shot 20-1 horses get some action since the payoffs are huge.
The races are very simple, roll a die and move. The #1 horse has 6 spaces
on the board where if it lands there it gets an extra move, #2 has 5
spaces, etc., while the #6 horse only has 1 space on the board that gives
it that bonus. There are also obstacles on the board, hedges and little
brooks. They’re actually quite harmless, except for one thing–
there are cards to be played!
Each player receives 3 cards at the start of the game. One of the most
basic cards allows you to take a horse out of a race if it’s in the
appropriate hedge row. Other cards allow you to mess with the finish of
the race (Stewards Enquiry and Objection), as well as cards that allow you
to mess with a horse’s movement during the race.
The net result is a very NASTY game. We loved it! It’s also a VERY chaotic
game. One player went from penniless to millionaire in one race (despite all his
efforts to prevent this). I scored big on the same race. I was spending
cards (eliminating 3 horses with one card!) to facilitate this as I wanted
my horse to win and I had bet on myself too.
We’ll definitely have to play this one again, although I do think it has
some flaws. For one it’s probably too long for what it is, especially
given the chaos factor. Three races would probably suffice (I’d love to
introduce an auction concept into which horses you’d start with). The way
we played you only got 3 cards to work with the entire game. That seems a
bit too static in terms of what you’re allowed to work with. But we
reckoned that drawing more cards between races or something would be
totally whacky. Perhaps a card exchange at the end of each race?

BEAN TRADER

I played this a handful of times and enjoyed it, except with 5 players. With that many it seemed rushed and the commodities a bit too sparse. So we played with the very
minor variant of using all 10 harvest cards (instead of prior to
triggering the game end (reshuffling for any further harvests).
We got into the wheeling and dealing quickly. Everyone seemed to
enjoy themselves. One was very creative in his deals. In fact if he was
selling snake oil to cure warts he probably would’ve sold a few bottles
right then and there. Both order cards I drew required a white bean (aka
black-eyed bean) and the only person with white beans wasn’t
trading em. I was tempted to keep ditching travel cards to purchase new order cards in order to find one that I could fill.
We did encounter a question about trading in a travel card for an order
card. Can you take that travel card from anywhere in your travel deck? Or
must it be the top most travel card?
I’m gonna have to pick this game up as I prefer it to Bohnanza.

RA

There were some wildly divergent strategies at play in this game. First
and foremost is my “use the Force” method (after all there’s no thinking
allowed in RA). Next was another player’s hyper analytical calculations coupled with
rambling monologue method. And most unique was a third player’s “Sun Tile
Relativity” theory which he explained to us in great detail. It had
something to do with only considering your tiles relative to themselves and
not in comparison to other player’s tiles when considering when to bid, but
I lost him when he got into Zoraster’s influence on ancient and modern
religions.

SPACE BEANS

It’s a funky little bean game which doesn’t have any trading involved. Turn order is clockwise as usual, but at the end of your turn you pass your *entire* hand to the guy on your right. So you get a bunch of cards and then have to wait till it comes
around for you to take your turn.

MARE NOSTRUM

In this game the trading bogged down, the Director of Commerce (or whatever
his title is) simply didn’t want to trade unless it was to his advantage
(figuring it would help out those who had more cards than he). Egypt was
raking in tons of Tax cards as usual and even Greece was outdrawing him in
cards. Thus trading was minimized….With no trading occurring, I couldn’t build wonders and was pretty much at my market/temple max. Thus I was relegated to building more military units. The problem with that is I hit the limit on the number of units, but still couldn’t make an effective offensive against Egypt.
Without trading the game seemed to bog down into a slug fest. And yet that
strangulation of trade was in Rome’s best interest and is fully
understandable.
I’ve got to try this with 5 players as the 4 player game seems to be
weighted a bit too much towards Egypt’s tax strategy. I also think that
the trading can be squashed too easily by the DofC, in fact if the players
are really paying attention, the whole game could get bogged down (“he’s got
9 tax cards,” “he’s got 10 different commodities,” etc.)

AMUN-RE

It took the first kingdom for everyone to get into the swing of things but the scores were knotted up by the end. The second kingdom was more interesting as we started to grasp the values of provinces and possible strategies. Bidding went WAY up. I went for an aggressive strategy of nabbing the largest pyramid clusters, but I paid through the nose for it.
AMUN-RE is a solid hit. Not great, but definitely good stuff. I
really like the interplay of the farmers, camels, temples as they effect
bidding. The blind bidding and power cards add a fair amount of luck, but
I don’t have a problem with that.

INTRIGUE

I was pretty much doomed from the start in this one. The planets of the
meta-game universe were not aligned in my favor. No matter what kind of
money I threw around I got sent to the island of misfit toys. Only pity
(and some back stabbing on my part) towards the end game got me out of the
basement.
Do not play this game with sensitive types. It’s just too brutal.

TAJ MAHAL

To make a long story short, it went over like a
lead balloon. It just seems like that
you can get whacked so hard, especially early on, that climbing back into
the game can be near impossible. And sometimes it just seems you can’t get
anything without giving up an arm for it, with other players sometimes
feeling the same way. As though you’re butting heads unintentionally.
Maybe the guy who gets nothing after spending 3 or more cards should get to
draw another card in addition to his 2? It just seems so damn harsh, as
though you’ve taken a plunge in sheep dip after running through thickets,
when you come out of an extended battle with *nada*.

DUEL OF AGES

There’s nothing drastically difficult about the game, but it is indeed
fiddly. Some of it is a bit unintuitive and the nomenclature is funky
(“Point” skill? What the heck is that?) and it takes a bit of getting used
to comparing color coded attributes on a chart, but before long it becomes
fairly obvious what the chart is going to say. There are also lots of
characters with special powers, special items and weapons resulting in lots
of funky situations which just add to the fiddliness factor. Overall it kind of reminded me of a simplified ASL (Advanced Squad Leader
to the uninitiated) grafted onto a Talisman/Space Hulk type game.
There are five total victory points that the two teams (black/white) are
vying for. Four are gained in labyrinths scattered across the board, the
fifth point is awarded to the team with most surviving characters. The
four labyrinths are sort of like race events and whichever team is ahead at
the end of the game in each labyrinth race gets a point for it. You get
ahead in the race by running to the end of the labyrinth and defeating the
”Adventure encounter.” An encounter card is drawn from the top of the deck
for that labyrinth (each has its own set of cards=encounters) and the
character must defeat the encounter in order for their team’s marker to
progress in the race. The more soundly you defeat it the more bonus stuff
(special item/weapon card draws) you get. And after the encounter (win or
lose) the character gets booted out and must reenter the board.
So what you have is a bunch of characters running around the board trying
to snipe and whack on each other while staying ahead in these four races.
Reactions to the game were fairly mixed, but I think almost everyone would
play it again and perhaps for an even longer period of time (say 3 hours
instead of 2). Then again no one put this on their “to buy” list.
A couple of minor tweaks we discussed were allowing every character to draw
two cards at game start and choose to keep one of them (in addition to any
cards they normally get to draw at game start). The running around getting
into fist fights was fairly silly and this lasted a fairly long period (my
characters never did get a weapon they were capable of using).
Another suggestion was getting those little plastic clip on bases for the character
counters, one set in white, the other in black, so you could see more
clearly whose character was where. The artwork is fine but the bits are
kinda small as is the map. I prefer the standard square counters on a hex
map as they stand out more; the hex character counters tended to blend in
with the terrain a bit too well.
I didn’t particularly like the meld of movement/fire/actions that is used,
it felt kinda kludgey (e.g. it takes 2 movement points–about a third of
your mps–to exchange items with another character but it takes your entire
turn to fire your weapon once?). I think they should’ve gone the Space
Hulk route and used Action Points for everything (i.e. 2 APs to snap shoot,
3 APs to aim shoot, APs to move as per terrain, 2 APs to drop/pickup item,
3 APs to go into overwatch, etc.)
An “amazing” hit should give you a bonus on your “penetration” roll (what
were they thinking when they put names to this stuff?).
Anyhoot, there’s lots of tweaks that could be employed and the system lends
itself fairly well to more chrome so customization is highly likely and
could easily be part of the fun. It’s an interesting design, although not nearly as unique as the hype would lead you to believe. The theme and game play is quirky and fun, the production values could be better. I think it’ll appeal more to (in order
of preference) the war gamer, miniatures, rpg crowd than it will to
euro-style gamers.

What’s Playing Too

by Mark Edwards

FRESH FISH

I read and then re-read the rules and then I read the one sheet aid on BGG and then I read some of the posts on spielfrieks. Argh! For whatever reason the rules were tough for me to wrap my head around. …The first game was pretty odd in that we were all trying to figure out what to do and, for whatever reason, the other players were overbidding….The second game was a lot different (and we started with the suppliers off the corners)….
I’m not sure what to make of FF. There’s some serious brain burning elements to it, but the blind bidding and especially the tile drawings add a fairly large random element to the proceedings. So despite all your careful thought and planning you can be fairly easily screwed by the tiles (either being unable to draw the one you need or watching your opponent screw you before you can screw him).
It’s definitely worth some repeat play. The screwage factor is fairly high. One player didn’t like the little (tiny!) cubes provided, so he upgraded with some multicolored bits of various shapes he found in some craft store. The artwork is nice and I like the board, but the tiles are a bit thin. I’d say that the production values are okay, but could be better.

SAMURAI

We used the variant that all captured pieces were placed in front of the screen thus removing the “hidden” scoring aspect. I think that made things even a bit more of a brain burn. One player played a piece that would potentially set me up, and I had my exchange tile available to take advantage of it and took two pieces to end the game. The two pieces were also enough to give me majority in rice paddies and high hats and thus the win.

SCHNAPPCHEN JAGD

A weird little trick taking game. It was a hard fought battle to see who was king of the junk collectors.

VISUAL EYES

This is a pretty good party game. You roll a bunch of large dice which have pictures on each of their faces (114 stickers which players labored to affix prior to
start). Using the face up pictures you try to assemble phrases and words
from sets of two dice. There’s one other dice that dictates the style of
play. “Slow” equates to Boggle-like play where everyone writes as many
entries as they can during an allotted period, while “Fast” play means that
a player grabs the two appropriate dice when they have used to make a valid word/phrase. There’s a bit of voting done on many of the more questionable entries and we discovered you could probably easily turn this into a negotiation game.
It’s a decent party game for those that enjoy such things. Our main party game guy seemed to struggle the most with this game as his mature brain just wasn’t as quick as it used to be, and there were also some generation gap problems when he didn’t recognize many of our answers and got outvoted.
Good fun and I might even pick up a copy for when I want to game with my wife.
A concern is that the replay value might be hampered by the limited amount
of pictures (you’ll probably start seeing a lot of repeat answers after a
while).

–Mark Edwards

What’s Playing

–Mark Edwards

DER HERR DER RINGE: Die Zwei Türme, Spiel zum Film
(THE LORD OF THE RING: The Two Towers, game of the film)

A very light cooperative/competitive game where the players gain points by
vanquishing orcs of varying (hidden to the players) point values. If the
orcs ever link up (from Mordor on one side and Isengard on the other) all
the players lose. If the players survive a certain amount of time (certain
orc chits trigger time to move forward as well as special events) then the
players simply add up the point value of the orc tiles they’ve
collected. The values on the tile range from 1-3.

KEYTHEDRAL

It took us a bit to get this one set up and going. The setup was kind
of painful. Yet once we got started it was quite easy. One of the steps during setup (laying out the map tiles plus our
adjoining towns) proved to be absolutely crucial and of course none of us
knew that at the time. You lay out tiles to create the map and you place
your five town tiles during this portion of the game. You’ll issue workers
from your towns into neighboring tiles and gather up various goods based on
your workers placement (there are 5 different kinds of goods to acquire).
So we were setting up with diversity in mind (Settler’s experience showing
that you’d want to be next to a blue resource and at least one red
resource, etc.). But in reality you really just want to be able to isolate
map segments to yourself (only one player can acquire goods from a given
map tile). After gathering up the resources you can use them to upgrade your towns to
cities (I’ve got the terminology wrong, but it’s much like Settlers in this
effect). Cities send out *2* workers each turn so the fight for resources
gets even nastier! You can also build fences preventing other players from
accessing certain tiles. In addition there are special “Law” cards you can
buy that allow some screwage and give bonuses. And you can build parts of
the cathedral that give you the VPs which you’ll want if you’re interested
in winning.
The first set of parts on the cathedral are worth 1 point and when they’re
built the next level is revealed and they are worth 2 points, etc. on up to
5 points at the top of the cathedral. The 1-pointers are easy to build
taking only a couple of resources, but as the points increase so do the
costs. There are also 3 different “special” resources that have to be
created from the resources you gather. I believe they are stained glass,
ironworks and gold, which cost 2, 3 and 4 “regular” resources to create
respectively. So the later 4 and 5 point valued cathedral parts might cost
a gold resource, a stained glass resource and some regular resource. The
cathedral parts for the next level are kept face down until all of the
preceding layer parts are built, so you don’t know exactly what the
upcoming costs will be. There are also fewer and fewer parts as you ascend
in value (so there are like five 1-point tiles and only two 4 and 5 point
tiles).
The portion of the game where you send out workers is probably the most
interesting and has a large amount of screwage potential. It’s kind of
hard to explain but you send out workers from your numbered towns and
cities based on player choices of numbered cylinders. So if a player chose
the ’2′ cylinder he sends out his workers from his ’2′ town/city and then
the player to his left sends out his ’2′ folks, etc., until everyone has sent
out workers from their ’2′ town/cities. Then the next player chooses one
of the remaining numbered cylinders and this process is repeated until all
5 town/city numbers have been chosen. There’s plenty of opportunity here
to cut off other players from being able to send out workers by carefully
choosing the cylinder number and then playing your workers where they’ll do
the most damage (gives you more options for later worker placement and cut
down [off] your opponent’s options). There are also the fences which allow
you to cut off other player’s access to map tiles.
I went for Law cards early and often and 3 out of 4 proved to be pretty
useful and probably were the main factor in my victory.
As mentioned earlier there are 5 different good types you can gather, but
it really turns out that outside of the early game where brown and black
(which you use to upgrade your towns to cities) are a little more valuable,
the color means little. Also the special goods can be created using any
color type goods so in the end there’s no real differentiation between the
various resources. You just want to get as many resources as possible each
turn, which is kind of disappointing when you stop to think about it.
The other problem we had with the game is that the end game seems a bit
clunky in that the 4 and 5 value cathedral tiles are worth so much more
than tiles retrieved earlier. Also, if you’re the player that builds the
last 4 value tile you’re setting up the guy to your left to be able to
build the first (of only 2) 5 pointers and you probably won’t have a chance
to nab the other.
It was definitely interesting and fun and I’d play it again, but there’s
something missing. I can’t quite put my finger on it though.
I love the production values, nice wooden bits and thick cardboard counters
and the artwork is very appealing. The town tiles could be easier to
distinguish and the 8 colors for resources are a bit brutal on us color
challenged types, but overall a thumbs up on the bits.
I just read some of the stuff on Board Game Geek about the game. One review even
mentioned that there’s bidding for turn order? Plus there was something
else about the order in which workers were placed that sounded different
than what we did. I also see that folks have created variants where there
are 6-point cathedral tiles, where they place all the cathedral tiles face
up at game start and where an extra cathedral tile per level is
added. Another twist was that in order to acquire one of the special goods
the resources you turned in all had to be the same type.

CONSPIRACY

Here’s the blurb for Conspiracy from Board Game Geek:
”There are four capitols, four bankbooks, one top secret briefcase and
eight greedy spies that anyone can control. The object is to move the
briefcase to your headquarters. Players can either secretly pay off or
openly move a spy one space on their turn. Each player has an account of
$10,000 and can bribe spies in increments of at least $100. If you move a
spy, another player may challenge the move. The two players then slowly
reveal how much money they each have on the spy in question. If the
challenger wins, the move is rescinded. If the defender wins, the move
stays and the challenger loses his next turn. Players need to cooperate
against whichever player is closest to victory. You can conspire openly to
swipe the case or murder a spy and turn the tables on a player who is a
mere one space away from winning. No dice, no cards, no luck involved.
Learn to work together or games will end in a hurry.”
It’s funny that someone just mentioned Kremlin in a SR because Conspiracy
felt a bit similar to me. In Kremlin you place your “influence” at game
start and in the basic game you aren’t allowed to change that. In
Conspiracy you make your “pay offs” incrementally during the game. In both
games having the most money/IPs on a spy/ politician allows you to control
their actions. So Kremlin is sort of a hyper fiddly version of Conspiracy.
So on your turn you may attempt to move a spy (with the briefcase in tow if
it starts in the same space) *OR* make a pay off to a spy *OR* have one spy
uncover (eliminate) another spy (in the same space). That last option is
interesting in that the spy who’s doing the uncovering must “pay” 1000 off
their account from the player who wishes to do the uncovering. So if
successful, the player who did the elimination has less money on the spy
that did the dirty deed and may lose control of him.
Our first game was a bit of a bust and went very quickly as we didn’t
recognize the importance of certain spaces on the board or realize how
quickly a spy could scoot to a HQ for the win. The second game was far more interesting. My early attempts to get the
briefcase to my HQ were barely thwarted when one player outbid me for Rita
Palmer and another outbid me on Ahmed Cahr. The briefcase then made a cross
board journey towards a competitor’s HQ as Rita ran for home with Ahmed in pursuit. But Mai Something or Other stood in the way; Ms Bea Haven arrived on the scene and was eliminated using Rita. This cost the player a $1k in payoff money on Rita and
effectively gave me control. And so it goes….
After the first game I would’ve dismissed Conspiracy as something I would
not likely play again, but my opinion did a 180 after the second
game. Although now my concern isn’t whether things will end too quickly
but rather that there’s a possibility they might drag. It was definitely a
fun game though and something I’ll have to hunt down as I think my kids
will enjoy it when they’re old enough to handle the math.
(CONSPIRACY is a Milton Bradley game from the 1960s.)

TotalCon Report Excerpt

–by Mark Edwards

I visited the con on Friday night, to do some advance scouting, and was pleased and yet disappointed with the board gaming going on. There were plenty of folks playing board games. I counted at least a dozen tables going. I saw RISK being played in several forms (2210 and LotR), Adv Civ, many and various train games, SFB, SCRABBLE(!), CIRCUS MAXIMUS, 3RD REICH, Sid Meier’s CIV THE BOARD GAME, ROBORALLY, SETTLERS, CARCASSONNE, DIPLOMACY and HISTORY OF THE WORLD. That’s a lot of board gaming going on outside of our Unity Games contingent. But almost all of the above are American produced and American style games. For instance CARCASSONNE was played briefly by two train gamers between games. The ubiquitous SETTLERS was being played because of a tourney. While talking with the CIV THE BOARD GAME (aka infamous Greyhawk Wars) guys I asked whether they played any Euro style games. They had no clue what I was talking about.
So, yeah, board gaming is alive and well at Total Con, but there’s still this lack of knowledge about games produced/created outside the US. I was carrying RA with me and I should’ve done an informal survey to see whether anyone in the board game rooms had ever heard or seen the game, or even heard of Rio Grande Games. I’m thinking it would only be a handful. As for the preference of monster games being played, I can understand that. The con is a good place to get a good ole monster game going. And I certainly have nothing against all the American style gaming going on. It’s just that many still don’t know there’s any choice outside of that.

What’s Playing Too

–by Mark Edwards

INTRIGUE

Basically you have a bunch of “relative” tokens of which you send out 2 each turn in search of work to other player’s “palazzos.” The other player then decides whether or not he’s going to give your relative a job and if so, which job (the high paying 100k or the piddly 10k kind). But first you get to bribe the player (ostensibly so they’ll give you a better job). Then there are the conflicts with other player’s relatives trying to find work at the same palazzo. They’re paying bribes too, and if you’ve both sent the same kind of relative (there are five different occupations), one of the prospective workers is going to be banished to the island of misfit toys for the duration. And wait, just because your relative got a job in someone’s palazzo doesn’t mean that later on he won’t oust you in favor of another player’s relative that’s come along in search of work, sometimes before your relative even gets paid!

Each turn you collect money for your relatives that have employment. You then accept bribes and place other player’s relatives who’ve come to your palazzo, and then you send out a couple of relatives to other player’s palazzos in search of work. The game lasts 6 rounds (the last is just a payout).
The resulting game is totally cut throat. You can bribe all you want but you carry no weight with the other player outside of the threat of future actions. There was a lot of bribing, cajoling, whining, and threatening going on, but it was all done with a smile. We had a lot of fun, but I’ll repeat what I’ve heard and read many times, you’ve gotta have the right crowd and frame of mind from the outset for this game.
Most adults couldn’t handle the hosage that takes place in this game. The screwage can start early and often–there’s simply no avoiding it . Yet it happens so frequently that you can’t even keep track of who you’re supposed to be getting retribution against. The screwage was usually very mercenary in nature. That is, whoever bribed the least got sent to the island of misfit toys. Unfortunately I think this led to bribes escalating out of control. Early in the game we saw an interesting phenomenon, which probably can occur fairly often in this game. Two players formed a little cartel of their own and were favoring each other’s relatives despite receiving larger bribes from others. It didn’t last all that long, but I can see where it could almost work.

SUNDA TO SAHUL

This is a beautiful looking puzzle tile laying game built around creating islands and populating them with your tribe counters. It really helps if you like jigsaw puzzles. A potential problem with the game as we played it (you can also play it with simultaneous play), is that there can be some serious downtime each turn as someone looks for just the right piece. This game will probably appeal to folks who like tile laying games and puzzles.

UM REIFENBREITE

It’s really just a roll and move game, except some of the luck aspect is mitigated in that you can use cards to fix one or both of your die rolls. But then they include chance cards (every time you roll a Œ7‚) to throw some randomness back in. So let that serve as fair warning to those of you that dislike luck and especially dicey luck in their games.

The theme really shines as using the drafting mechanic to your advantage is a large part of the game. Basically you can tail along behind someone when they move. So if they roll well you just stick to their butt. There are ways of shedding these butt stickers by playing cards or moving into certain spots. And as a butt sticker if you don’t like the roll of the leader you can decline to tail along and roll for yourself.
Terrain is handled very simply. There are different colored spaces on the board representing asphalt, cobblestone, mountains and downhill. For cobblestone and mountains there’s a number on each space and you deduct that number from your die roll to get the number of spaces to move. For downhill terrain you add the number.
You have 4 riders on your team and you’re trying to win as a team (you get points based on each of your rider’s finishing positions). At the start your team is all jumbled up with other riders so you can’t easily form a peloton of your own riders.
I think it’s a pretty fun game in the same family as Formula De. So if you like FD, I recommend giving it a try.

VINCI

Game pushing is a fine art, and doing the research and being prepared are yet another set of tools for the master craftsman. Civ combos are good at
gobbling up territories and give you lots of troops to do it with, but they
don’t give any extra VPs for holding territories. So the best use of them
is to go kick some opponent butt if they’re doing too well with their
”peacenik” civ (the ones that give fat points to holding types of
land). The problem with the “kick some butt” combos is that early on
there’s no real leader to squash and since they can conquer a lot of
territory your civ is left spread out. They don’t net as many points as
the “peacenik” civs and they get broken apart more easily since they are so
spread out.

One player took two civs in a row that had fortifications. I don’t know if it’s a new rule with the 2nd edition or not, but I had never played that forts give you an offensive advantage before. Pretty neat!
I think Vinci is good stuff with some neat mechanics in the civ selection mechanism and I love the civ combos that keep each game fresh. The whine factor can be
fairly high (“why are you attacking me? He’s winning!”) and I think
playing with open VPs makes analysis paralysis easy to fall into.

CANNES

I’ve got a soft spot for movie making games, but I don’t know if this really qualifies as one. We had to struggle with making the theme fit some of the game’s bits and mechanics. Like how often do movie producers go out of their way to gather computer chips to create computers? And how about the two regular people as input make one movie star tile? I’m also not a fan of Splotter’s artwork. It looks like something I would draw and that’s not a good thing. They do get points for using nice thick cardboard counters and tiles.

I did like the map building and constructing a network concept, but overall the game just didn’t appeal. And we ran into the same problem many others have reported. The game seemed to end very prematurely. Sure we were just novices, but only a total of three movies were produced. Not much of a movie making game really. I’ll have to play it again–it deserves a bit more thought than we gave it and I’m sure experience would go a long way to solving the premature ending.

ROYAL TURF

It’s definitely a good game to illustrate the finer points of screwage.

AVE CAESAR

Plenty of screwage meted out in this fine little racing game. We liked
the earthy color scheme used for the pieces.

Mark Edwards, a collector of games to play and a great analyst of “screwage” and “hosage” mechanisms, runs a game playing group weekly from his home in South Attleboro, Massachusetts. If you would like to learn more about the group, or care to comment on his commentary, email Mark through this newsletter (click on “Email Us” in the Main Menu).

What’s Playing

Mark Edward’s Play Sessions—Mini-reviews, notes, and comments

SHOW MANAGER

It started well enough, I got some wildcards and a couple of decent Ballet cards for cheap, plus a couple of ’9′ cards for future use. I figured I’d put out a middlin Ballet in one of the lower cities and borrow heavily from it. The problem with that was everyone else had the same idea with the smaller shows. I was left with the choice of putting my crappy Ballet in New York or Hamburg, the top 2 cities. I tried to scramble and find some better Ballet actors to no avail and I blew my initial cash on the effort. I put Ballet in Hamburg.
So I was broke after my first show, which was a lousy one. Not good. I managed to put on a decent King Lear (in Koln), but when I took a piddly 1,000 DM loan on it to grab a ’9′ I essentially tanked it. It ended up in 3rd or 4th place because of that tiny loan and I didn’t recover the lost VP with the ’9′ I grabbed either. Even my last gasp of clearing the board to find the lone remaining Queenie ’9′ went for naught. It ended up in 3K spot while I only had 2k left. Doh.

CLOUD 9

It’s basically a push your luck sort of game with dice rolling and matching card play. Easy enough for a child to understand but it has just enough strategy involved to keep an adult interested.

UNION PACIFIC

I went my usual junk stock route, collecting stocks in the little train companies and snatching 2nd place in the bigger companies with as little stock as possible. It didn’t work, at least not for me. The person who took the win had gone for the simple, yet very effective, route of concentrating on only 2 companies, the monster green chain and U.P. itself.

BIG SHOT

An auction/influence game. I’m not sure why, perhaps it’s the lack of theme, but this just didn’t grab me, but I’m definitely willing to give it another go.
. Basically you’re bidding on lots consisting of cubes of each player. If you win the bidding you get to place the cubes on the board into regions of various VP values. Once seven cubes occupy a region that region is resolved. If there’s a clear majority of any player’s cubes that player owns the region and will score its value at game’s end. Ties cancel so the player with the next highest amount of cubes would win. You start with 10 bucks to spend, which isn’t nearly enough, but there’s a neat mechanism for borrowing. You can take a loan for $10, but you only get $9 of it paid to you. You can continue taking loans but each one nets you $1 less (i.e. the 2nd loan gets you $8, 3rd $7, etc.) and at the end of the game you must pay them back at full price of $10.

ST. PETERSBURG

This is one of those games where midway through you may realize you have no chance and thus are just there to play out the string and perhaps do some kingmaking.

Money

My favorite filler. (Filler or not, it’s in my top-ten!—editor)

DIE FUGGER

A QUANDARY descendent.

MEDICI

Another stalwart choice for 6 players. Mental note: look at how many points a player has available to bid before bidding. I’m afraid to think about how many times people have bid higher than they needed to.

CHRONONAUTS

As with Fluxx sometimes winning seems quite accidental.

ILLUMINATI: NEW WORLD ORDER (aka INWO)

In short it feels and plays a whole lot like its predecessor. Lots of screwage and complicated scenarios for winning, knocking down the leader until finally someone sneaks in the win with some unexpected maneuver. My shot at victory was foiled when one opponent killed off Elvis! ARGH!

GOA

My initial impression is that it’s a kin to Princes of Florence. The player interaction is limited to the auction and everything else is a matter of how efficient your logistics are. It’s neat, but not something I’d clamor for.

PONTE VECCHIO

PV is an odd little game featuring auctions and lots of bribery and cut throat negotiating, with a dash of board play thrown in. Despite that, and the fact that I won, I wasn’t enamored with it.

VIKING FURY

There’s nothing too complicated here. It’s basically an action point system (think Viking Tikal) with some screwage and special powers supplied via card play. Oh yeah, throw in lots of dice rolling. The Saga cards which drive the game make it sort of a mini-quest game as the players vie to complete the “missions.” There’s lots of ways to score, raids, settlements, trading, completing missions, etc. It’s not a bad game but it’s way too long for what it is. I’d rather play Tikal which plays quicker, cleaner and has better components to boot. Like Tikal (and many action point games) it’s probably best to avoid playing with folks that are prone to analysis paralysis. The production values are consistent with other Ragnar Bros. games. The cloth map is neat but lacks color (and appeal). We borrowed wooden galleys from Mare Nostrum since the cardboard ones supplied with the game were lacking.